Curious to see how some college students are making millions "trading"

So I was watching the Big Short and there were couple of characters that made lots of money trading like right of college. I was curious because what information do these people have that the general public doesn't? Is it luck or work ethic or smarts?

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Best Response

It is a movie but it is based on the Michael Lewis book. If anything the book, which is very accurate, is even more outlandish. I don't think making marginal returns regularly off of options is particularly hard (Cornhole Capital or whatever) but other than that these guys shorted securities that were part of an enormous economic collapse. If it was easy to see an event like that in the horizon, well maybe it could have been stopped.

Highly recommend watching Inside Job, although it has some liberal tunnel vision propaganda, it is still very informative. Also, read or listen to the book it's 10x more fascinating.

Also, Bales character, Burry, suffers from Aspergers and when learning finance would routinely pull multi-day stints along with all-nighters. He became absolutely obsessed and because of his disorder had laser focus. My point is that some guys, Cornhole Capital, relatively got a little lucky. Burry, was a fuckin Rainman.

If it was easy everyone would do it, if no one believed they could do it because of how hard it is, these guys wouldn't be multi-millionaires today.

Perception.

 

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